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Inequality Is Rising Across the Globe — and Skyrocketing in the U.S.

Every few months, Thomas Piketty (and/or a handful of other economists with a social conscience) will remind the world that a tiny elite is binge-eating the global economic pie while 7 billion humans fight for their table scraps. Journalists will then aggregate some alarming statistics and edifying charts; progressives will share these over social media, adorned with red-faced emoji (and/or jokes about guillotines) — and congressional Republicans will carry on trying to establish a special, zero-percent tax rate for people who inherit private islands.

All of which is to say: It’d be understandable if you felt too familiar with — and hopeless about — the inequities of late capitalism to summon much enthusiasm for reading the 2018 World Inequality Report.

But it is a remarkable document, one that consolidates research from Piketty and more than 100 other economists into a broad overview of global income-and-wealth inequality. So, if you want to get a truly holistic perspective on the inequality problem — and how it can be solved — it’s worth digesting the report’s key findings:

Since 1980, the richest 0.1 percent of the world’s population increased its collective wealth by as much as the poorest 50 percent.
The 7 million richest humans (i.e., the top 0.1 percent) on the planet captured 13 percent of all economic growth over the past four decades — about as much as the poorest half of the world population (about 3.8 billion people). The top 0.001 percent (i.e., the wealthiest 76,000 people on Earth) claimed a hefty 4 percent of all economic gains.

The top one percent, meanwhile, lay claim to 27 percent of global wealth growth — a fortune facilitated by a steep rise in the cohort’s share of global income beginning in the early 1990s (right after the Soviet Union fell).

This is basically why in my neigbourhood this "thingy" still stands as if nothing happened, even if it is 2017. It even seems to gets maintance.

Or why our socialist Mayor who is also the president of "work and solidarity" party won his 6th term.
Or why the Church is sending anti-market messages, on its quest of looking for more fair society.
Or why our main pro business party is at 0.9% of support on the country wide level.

It is quite ironic actually, the market itself has become "unsellable".

All I can say is that US citizens are living better than 80% of the planet.

That is a good point, there's the whole question of whether somewhere experiencing an obesity epidemic can ever truly be considered to have poverty in the same way as other parts of the world, your post is probably a nearly perfect illustration of Rawlsian justice, if the poor in the totally unequal society with growing inequality are better of than the poor in all alternative sorts of social stratification then isnt that sort of society the best, from the stand point of judging social justice to amount to how well are the poor doing?

Jefferson wouldnt have loved this over privileged plutocracy though, I know that much.

All I can say is that US citizens are living better than 80% of the planet.

That is a good point, there's the whole question of whether somewhere experiencing an obesity epidemic can ever truly be considered to have poverty in the same way as other parts of the world, your post is probably a nearly perfect illustration of Rawlsian justice, if the poor in the totally unequal society with growing inequality are better of than the poor in all alternative sorts of social stratification then isnt that sort of society the best, from the stand point of judging social justice to amount to how well are the poor doing?

Jefferson wouldnt have loved this over privileged plutocracy though, I know that much.